Friday, July 17, 2009

Michael Feathers on Functional Programming

One of the things that seems like a rather pessimistic observation, but I think it's true to a degree, that the number of programmers who are able to or willing to think in a mathematically sophisticated way about code is relatively small, in comparison to the total population of programmers. I think that even though functional programming is becoming more popular, it is a bit of uphill battle for the industry and it may become just a very strong good niche tool for the people who are able to use it very well. I'm glad to see it's being brought up in prominence now, but I'm wondering if we'll ever see a day when everybody is doing work in functional programming. On the other hand, we got to the point where closures are becoming part of practically every programming language. It only took 30 years, so there is hope, I guess.